Data center GPUs for the intelligent visual cloud
Intel has introduced Data Center Flex Series GPUs designed to meet the requirements for intelligent visual cloud workloads. The Data Center GPU Flex Series, says the company, offers a single graphics processing (GPU) solution built to flexibly handle a wide range of workloads without compromising on performance or quality.
It also helps lower and optimizes the total cost of ownership for diverse cloud workloads like media delivery, cloud gaming, AI, metaverse and other emerging visual cloud use cases.
“We are in the midst of a pixel explosion driven by more consumers, more applications and higher resolutions,” says Jeff McVeigh, Intel vice president and general manager of the Super Compute Group. “Today’s data center infrastructure is under intense pressure to compute, encode, decode, move, store and display visual information. Intel ?Flex Series GPU is a breakthrough design that uniquely solves today’s computing demand while providing flexibility and scalability for the immersive experiences of tomorrow.”
With the industry’s first hardware-based AV1 encoder in a data center GPU, the Flex Series GPU is offered as providing five times media transcode throughput performance and two times decode throughput performance at half the power of competitive solutions. It delivers more than 30 percent bandwidth improvement for significant total cost of ownership (TCO) savings, in addition to broad support for popular media tools, APIs, frameworks and the latest codecs, says the company.
Powered by the company’s Xe-HPG architecture and backed by an expansive ecosystem of hardware vendors and software developers, the GPUs are offered as providing flexible scaling of AI inference workloads from media analytics to smart cities to medical imaging between CPUs and GPUs without locking developers into proprietary software. The software stack is enabled by oneAPI, freeing developers from the economic and technical burdens of proprietary programming models.
It’s an open alternative to proprietary language lock-in, says the company, that enables the full performance of the hardware with a complete, proven set of tools that complement existing languages and parallel models. This allows users to develop open, portable code that will take maximum advantage of various combinations across the company’s line of CPUs and GPUs.
Key features include:
About Performance: From the start, the Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series will offer capabilities for media processing and delivery and Android cloud gaming.
Media processing and delivery: The video processing demands of video conferencing, streaming, and social media have transformed the compute resource requirements of the data center.
- The Flex Series GPU media architecture, powered by up to four Xe Media Engines, focuses on the highest stream density demands for the modern data center without compromising quality:
- Delivers five times media transcode throughput, two times decode throughput at half the power (Intel Flex Series 140 GPU compared to Nvidia A10).
- Delivers up to 36 streams 1080p60 transcode throughput per card.
- Delivers eight streams 4K60 transcode throughput per card.
- When scaled to 10 cards in a 4U server configuration, it can support up to 360 streams HEVC-HEVC 1080p60 transcode throughput.
- The Flex Series GPU’s hardware-based, open-source AV1 encoder delivers more than 30% bandwidth savings. The Flex Series GPU’s media engine also supports and improves performance for broad range of industry codecs, including HEVC, AVC and VP9.
- Leveraging Intel Deep Link Hyper Encode feature, the Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series 140 with two devices on a single card can meet the industry’s one-second delay requirement while providing 8K60 real-time transcode. This capability is available for AV1 and HEVC HDR formats.
Android cloud gaming: Explosive growth of cloud gaming has created the need for more flexible solutions that maximize simultaneous game streams for users. The Flex Series GPU is built for high gameplay quality, delivering an unparalleled gaming experience across different devices. It is validated on nearly 90 of the most popular Google Play Android game titles
Open Software Stack: Developers can access a comprehensive, software stack that combines open-source components and tools to effectively realize the Flex Series GPU capabilities for visual cloud workloads including support for oneAPI and OpenVINO. Intel’s oneAPI tools empower developers to deliver accelerated applications and services, including the Intel oneAPI Video Processing Library (oneVPL), Intel VTune Profiler and others.
Systems featuring Flex Series GPUs will be available from global providers including Dell Technologies, HPE, H3C, Inspur, Lenovo and Supermicro. Solutions with the Flex Series GPU will ramp over the coming months, starting with media delivery and Android cloud gaming workloads. These will be followed by Windows cloud gaming, AI and VDI workloads.
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